“All Thoughts Fly” is the latest album by swedish composer Anna von Hausswolff, consisting entirely of instrumental and minimalistic organ soundscapes tending to the ethereal, oneiric and enchanted. Von Hausswolff has travelled a curious path, humbly starting with indie rock/pop before discovering the pipe organ and integrating it into ambient compositions to which she began adding influences from post-rock, tribal folk and metal, always accompanied by powerfully ritualistic vocals with a similar effect to Lisa Gerrard’s in Dead can Dance. For “All Thoughts Fly”, her music is distilled to its essence through the sacrificial devotion to atmosphere.
The album’s premise feels like an ascetic experiment: extracting as much expressivity from the most minimal of means. The development of each piece happens mostly at the harmonic level, with a simple theme (a drone or rhythmic figure) timidly rearing its head in order to be progressively enriched by new layers, like a lone bird’s song gradually accumulating a myriad of voices. The dramatic weight rests entirely on the interaction between these layers as they grow in intensity or slowly wither away to grant preeminence to a new aural pulse. While it is true that most ambient music relies on repetition for the heightened impact of each minute movement, the intention here is more of a continuous flow by subtly and gradually mutating the layers and thus avoid theatrical contrasts.
As should be expected for this type of music, the priority is the creation of a spacious sonic environment whose evolving texture envelops the listener, with the bulk of the album subsisting on drawn out drones perfectly serene and fulfilled in their melancholy. A sense of nostalgic wistfulness prevails, specially in compositions like “Delore di Orsini”, “Persefone” and “Oustide the Gate”. A transcendental reverence for Nature emanates from the record, reminiscent of the primordial Dionysian state of absolute peace and enchantment in one’s surroundings, even when facing the apparently sinister. Indeed, the album’s best moments are those that seem to harken back to such an edenic consciousness, before what William Blake conceives as the fall of Imagination and its usurpation by Reason.
For such purposes, no emotion can be too disrupting or disquieting, except for the occasional ecstatic eruptions of earthly wonder when these dense constructions reach their climax. Every moment that tends to the uncanny is eventually complemented by the mystical embrace of Gaea, and one gets the impression that the sense of unease comes from the listener’s initial reluctance in departing from ordinary consciousness and fully giving in to this primordial oneness with Nature.
Von Hausswolff’s main premise and potential lies in the exploration of the limits of the pipe organ in the context of richly textured ambient music; the soundscapes of “All Thoughs Fly” are successfully immersive and would be of great use in a film soundtrack, the inner journeying of a session of meditation, or simply a moment of relative quietness and contemplation in the midst of the deafening sensory overload that characterizes this day and age.
